Thursday, February 7, 2013

EVE online: The great ship skill changes of summer 2013

Earlier today a dev blog was published regarding the ongoing tiericide/ship rebalancing.
See http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=74234 for more details.

This will be the new simplified ship progression tree.



To train battleships right now you need frigate and cruiser skills at rank 4.
To train battleships in the future you will need the frigate, destroyer, cruiser and battlecruiser skills at rank 3.
So to compensate players for needing more skills they reduced the required ranks as well. Spaceship command will of course also remain as a required skill in all cases.

Frigates and destroyers are a rank 2 skill, cruisers x5 and battlecruisers x6 (and battleships x8).
In the old setup you needed 384.440 sp to get the prerequisites for a battleship.
In the new setup you will need 144960 sp to get the preqrequisistes for a battleship.

This will help new players to get into bigger hulls faster. Whether that is a good thing or not is another discussion really, but I think new players will like the change because it allows them to reach a specific goal faster or will allow for faster specialization.

Capital ship requirements will be lowered to BS rank 3 as well, allowing for faster specialization and also allowing you to branch out to other races more easily.
Do you think this will get some tears from the 'elite' pvp crowd because they wasted some precious skillpoints? Or will they 'harden the f*ck up' and accept that eve is not a static game.

Tech2/3 ships will only require the relevant racial hull size. So to fly a command ship you need the command ship skill but no longer do you have to train up assault frigates and heavy assault cruisers as well.
You won't need skills in one tech2 ship as requirement to fly another tech2 ship. So it wil be easier to get into recon, hac and command ships.

I am an industrial player without orca and there are times I really miss the ability to move big amounts of ore/minerals/ice products etc. The rebalancing will ease requirements to get into an orca as well for which I am grateful. Training time should be reduced by about a month.

A while ago there was news about new pirate rookie ships and someone made a comment that it would make more sense if in caldari space you get new a caldari rookie ship instead of having your insurance company keep gallente rookie ships in supply.
With rookie ships only requiring spaceship command 1 everyone will be able to fly all rookie ships.

Faction navy ships will get their requirements changed to rank 2 instead of 3-4 as it is now for most hulls. Faction BS however might only require rank 1 to fly now and will require rank 2 after the change.
This is one of the few cases where you won't be able to fly the hull after the changes while you can do so now. The reasoning is that training from rank1 to rank2 will only take a few hours at most.

Capital ships will get some requirements reduced and some increased. In general the capital ship skill will have to be trained to a higher level as before and some specialized skills needed to fly the ship anyway (jump drive skills for example) will be added to the requirements as well.

So to make it more clear to players just how long it will take to get into a hull the requirements for specialized modules will be added to skills.
For example to fly an interdictor you will need graviton physics I and propulsion jamming V.
Must say when I started reading the article I assumed requirements for T2 ships would be lowered as well but it seems CCP remains of the opinion that T2 ships are specialized ships. Meaning they are a bigger timesink for a smaller reward. Although thavign those skills at 5 will make you help that much more effective and make optimal use of your ship.

EAF receive another change as well. Currently you need Electronic Upgrades 5 to fly an EAF.  This will change to Long Range Targeting 5 instead.

If you have Destroyer and Battlecruiser 5 trained, you should account for approximately 6.2 additional million skill points.
Yay, that is a 15-30% increase in SP for my characters.

All in all I am a happy person with the proposed changes. Do you feel these changes are all for the better or do you think there are serious negatives as well?

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